Hello, after some time spent in thinking, design and developing, I've wrapped up a pre-release for a tool that aims to provide a clean infrastructure to manage systems with multiple configurations, like laptops.
The software is called stated and is found in: http://people.debian.org/~enrico/stated.html stated is a daemon that keeps track of the system state, reacting to changes. It manages a set of user-defined variables representing the system state; when some variable changes, user-defined code is executed to reconfigure the system for the new situation. Stated can be used to gather all kind of informations like battery charge, LAN network identification, PPP connection status, USB or PCMCIA devices present in the system, etc. in a single place and to run reconfiguration scripts with a more complete knowledge of the situation. stated also provides an interpreter for simple special-purpose language costructs that ease writing complex action scripts. The difference with other programs used to reconfigure a system on the fly is in the approach: stated does not know anything about the system and just holds a model of it in the form of user-defined variables. This makes it generic, providing a level of abstraction upon which it should be possible to easily build handlers for complicated reconfiguration scenarioes. The package, among all other documentation, contains a RATIONALE file with more detailed discussion on the design choices that have been made to come up with it. I make the announce here to gather feedback about the package; if people other than me will find it at least potentially useful, I'll be happy to go on with the TODO, fill in some little gaps it still have and add it to the Debian system. Please let me know what you think about it. Yours truly, Enrico -- GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
